Abstract

Today's most common circuit models increasingly tend to loose their validity in circuit simulation due to the rapid technological developments, miniaturization and higher complexity of integrated circuits. This has motivated the idea of combining circuit simulation directly with distributed device models to refine critical circuit parts. In this thesis we consider a model, which couples partial differential equations for electromagnetic devices - modeled by Maxwell's equations -, to differential-algebraic equations, which describe basic circuit elements including memristors and the circuit's topology. We analyze the coupled system after spatial discretization of Maxwell's equations in a potential formulation using the finite integration technique, which is often used in practice. The resulting system is formulated as a differential-algebraic equation with a properly stated leading term. We present the topological and modeling conditions that guarantee the tractability index of these differential-algebraic equations to be no greater than two. It shows that the tractability index depends on the chosen gauge condition for Maxwell's equations. For successful numerical integration of differential-algebraic equations the index characterization plays a crucial role. The index can be seen as a measure of the equation's sensitivity to perturbations of the input functions and numerical difficulties such as the computation of consistent initial values for time integration. We generalize index reduction techniques for a general class of differential-algebraic equations by using the tractability index concept. Utilizing the index reduction we deduce local solvability and perturbation results for differential-algebraic equations having tractability index-2 and we derive an algorithm to calculate consistent initializations for the spatial discretized coupled system. Finally, we demonstrate our results by numerical experiments.